


take your time coming home

by stolemyslumber



Series: Mutant AU [2]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mutants, Alternate Universe - Politics, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-13
Updated: 2012-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-31 01:56:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stolemyslumber/pseuds/stolemyslumber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nate has Mike. Everything else is up in the air.</p><p>A coda to <i>I burn at the ends, I learn to regret</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take your time coming home

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song of the same title by the band fun.
> 
> Thanks to [lakeeffectgirl](http://lakeeffectgirl.livejournal.com/) for beta-reading!
> 
> For anyone who's curious, Senator Blake is played by [Lance Reddick](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0714698/) from Fringe and The Wire.

*

 

They weather about a thousand different storms in three years. Blake’s staff, except for a nervous-looking intern, quit after that first speech. The recall campaign starts up around the same time. It’s five months until the October elections, and it looks like that’s all the time they’re going to have.

In the beginning, it’s hard to even stay shifted for the two hours he’s in public for the speech. He spends the drive back to Morgantown in a near-panic, sure that he must have screwed something up, expecting someone to figure it out.

Mike says they’re fine. Mike lets him talk through it twice, over-analyzing every second, and then he tells Nate to shut up and get some sleep.

No one figures it out. They hire new staff, new security. They move offices. Nate does interviews. Diane Sawyer, Anderson Cooper. He and Mike keep an open connection, ready for Mike to feed him facts for any questions Nate can’t answer.

The safe house feels strange every time they go back. He can’t talk about what he’s doing, although he assumes most of them know. He’s not there when Ray gets taken, and he can’t get away in time to help get him back. Poke goes, and the rush of relief Nate feels from Mike in the middle of a meeting tells him they’re okay.

That first month is nothing but interviews, staff meetings, lunches with campaign contributors, and hush-hush meetings with people on the hill who are on the fence about coming out against the Registration Act. Those meetings are the most important. He cancels four of them when they get the call that it’s time to get Walt.

 

*

 

Being Blake is easier, after. After he nearly loses Brad and Ray, after he gets Walt back and then loses him for good. It’s easier to wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and see Blake’s face looking back at him. He gets better at maintaining it. It gets so most days, he doesn’t look like himself until he’s at home, ready to go to bed.

It’s better for the mission. Less of a chance for slip-ups. He tells Mike that, when Mike asks about the amount of time he’s spending as Blake. Mike agrees, but the concern doesn’t leave his eyes. When it goes further, when Nate goes to sleep as Blake and doesn’t always wake up as Nate, he keeps it to himself.

Mike starts growing a beard. He keeps it trimmed short, and starts dyeing it and his hair a warm shade of brown. He stops hiding away in their offices quite so much. Nate feels better, having Mike at his side more often.

 

*

 

In September, a man waits outside the Hart building with a gun. Nate gets a sick feeling in his stomach as they walk out the doors, hatred and anger washing over him. He stumbles under the weight of it, and a second later the shots start ringing out.

The bullet goes through his left shoulder and buries itself in the cement wall behind him. There are cameras everywhere, as there are any time he goes out. A dozen angles to analyze the shooting from. If he hadn’t stumbled, they say it would have been a perfect shot to the heart. Nate doesn’t watch the footage, but he knows it’s true. Richard White was gunned down believing he’d killed Blake, that he’d practiced for so long and the shot had been perfect. If he’d realized he missed, he might have kept aiming for Blake instead of firing off three rounds into the crowd before the cops took him down.

If he’d killed Blake, Mike says, he might be a hero to some people. But White didn’t assassinate Blake. He tried and failed, and killed an innocent mother and daughter instead. He’s a murderer, not a martyr.

Nate wants to go to the funerals. He checks himself out AMA and drives to Lancaster. He stands in a gas station bathroom and wills his face to change into something anonymous, someone who can sit in the back of a church and mourn quietly as Michael Long speaks about his wife and daughter.

Nothing happens. His face stays the same. Edward Blake stares stubbornly back at him from the mirror. Nate drives home.

He goes to Mike’s apartment. Mike doesn’t say anything about his unanswered phone calls. There are fresh bandages and painkillers waiting at Nate’s house for him to come home, so Mike puts Nate in the passenger seat of his own car and drives them across town.

There are reporters waiting outside the house. Nate’s exhausted, and it’s two hours past the time he should have taken another dose of painkillers. What he says in front of the cameras that night about grief and hate and the toll it takes on people is the most honest, unrehearsed thing he’s said in months.

Mike takes him inside before he can cry on national television. He changes Nate’s bandages. He sets two pills on Nate’s tongue and presses a bottle of water to his lips.

In the morning, the youtube video of what Blake said to the reporters has six hundred thousand hits and counting. Two weeks later, Blake wins the recall election.

 

*

 

Ferrando publicly resigns in February of the following year. It’s three weeks before the planned re-opening of the facilities -- not that the public would have known until opening day. It puts the Org into a tailspin, scrambling to replace him before the facilities go live.

A week after Ferrando’s resignation, they pick the son of a Congressman from Texas and set up a round of interviews. In the first one, he implies that the Org wouldn’t be opposed to a system that neuters or euthanizes mutants like dogs. The re-opening is pushed back indefinitely, and half the anti-mutant contingent on the Hill start making nice with Blake in order to distance themselves from the ensuing shitstorm.

Nate is tired. Every lunch meeting is a game, every speech a minefield. It helps to have Mike as his navigator, his confidant, and occasionally a very necessary voice of reason. But they’re both tired. They won the recall on the heels of the assassination attempt, and Blake’s hastily-groomed opponent hadn’t been up to the task. The next election will be different.

 

*

 

He comes home one night to find Patterson in his living room. Bryan asks if he wants to “take that off,” and Nate doesn’t pretend he’s referring to the suit.

“We need you to make a decision,” Bryan says. “If we’re going to fight for your seat, we need to start now. If you’d like to step down after the next election, you need to make an announcement soon. We have someone for you to endorse.”

Mike is still awake when Nate reaches out to him after Bryan leaves. They make plans to meet at the office for an early breakfast. Nate sleeps better that night than he has in months.

They talk through every option over breakfast from Crepes at the Market (who have gotten entirely too much of Nate’s money in the past year). Mike asks, carefully, if Nate _wants_ to keep going. Nate takes a drink of OJ and lets himself think about doing this for another six years.

“Last night, before he left,” he says, “Patterson told me this was more than they’d ever hoped for. It doesn’t even feel like we’ve done that much. Ferrando, the recall, the Registration opposition. I just.” His throat gets tight, suddenly, and Mike shifts his chair closer. “I can’t figure out if it was all worth it.”

“You can’t think about it like that,” Mike says. “We haven’t done all this just to change a few votes, Nate. If that were all this was, it _wouldn’t_ be worth it. But this isn’t about them. It’s about us. This is about making it so what happened to you, and Poke, and Brad --” Nate knocks his fork onto the floor in an aborted movement, and Mike puts his hand on Nate’s knee under the table, steadying him -- “and what happened to Eric and Walt, making it so that can’t happen again.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” Nate says quietly. Mike just looks at him, waiting until Nate looks up.

“You _are_ doing it,” Mike says. “You have been. But it’s okay to let somebody else take over on this end. I think Edward Blake could use a little time off.”

Nate folds his own -- _Blake’s_ hand -- over Mike’s. “We could go home,” he says.

 

*

 

The last sixteen months of Blake’s term seem to last forever. He announces Blake’s retirement in late March, after a month of vicious attack ads from his expected opponent. He references the ads in his speech, builds Blake up as a family man with recent tragedy in his life, and Cole Baldwin as an unscrupulous man who has more in common with Richard White or even Dave McGraw than any Senator ever should.

He endorses Eckloff, a Maryland State Senator with years of experience, who wins the election by in October by three percent.

The day Eckloff takes over is cool but sunny. Senator Blake has plans to leave Maryland and spend some time relaxing in an undisclosed location. Nate and Mike have plans to go the Boston and sleep for about a week.

They don’t talk on the drive. The house is just how Nate left it. He and Mike end up in the guest room in their boxers, too exhausted to make it upstairs or dig in their bags for pajamas.

It’s dark again when Nate wakes up. They left the bathroom light on, and it’s enough that Nate can find his glasses on the nightstand. Everything blurs when he puts them on. He blinks, but the room stays out-of-focus. Mike’s sitting up next to him, half awake. He reaches up and pulls the glasses off Nate’s nose.

“Your eyes are green,” he says.

 

*

 

It takes three weeks. Nate can’t force it; his power remembers what it’s like to have his own body, but his mind doesn’t. He’ll try to think about it, about being shorter, about feeling callouses in different places on his hands. It all slips away when he tries to focus on it.

Mike wakes him up one morning and studies him carefully. He touches Nate’s hair, runs a thumb over the crooked scar on Nate’s knee, and looks at the freckles on Nate’s shoulders for so long Nate almost thinks he might be counting them.

“Yeah,” Mike says finally, one hand curled around Nate’s ankle.

“You’re sure?” Nate asks. Mike nods. “How do you know?”

“I just know. I remember.” He reaches up to brush Nate’s hair out of his face. “You look older.”

“You’re sure,” Nate says again, and then they’re kissing, soft and careful. It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff. They go over, hands and mouths everywhere, Mike pressing Nate down into the sheets, Nate clutching at his shoulders. They press together like teenagers, hips grinding together as they kiss.

Nate fumbles a hand between them and into Mike’s shorts. Mike goes still. He touches Nate’s face, the curve of his mouth.

“I want --” he starts, and Nate’s nodding, tugging Mike’s shorts down over his hips while Mike works on Nate’s.

“I don’t have anything,” he whispers against Mike’s throat. He bites him there, and Mike’s hips jerk against his. So much _skin_. Nate can barely think. He feels a nudge toward the bedside table -- they’re still so in tune, but Nate doesn’t mind if that part of all of this never goes away. Mike grins, unrepentant, when Nate finds the unopened tube of lube in the otherwise empty drawer.

“What?” Mike says. “I’ve been waiting.”

“It’s only been --” Nate says, thinking of the way Mike’s watched him turn back into himself, the open anticipation he doesn’t try to hide.

“Nate,” is all Mike says, and Nate feels a surge of anger at himself, for not knowing. “No,” Mike says. He rolls them over so Nate’s on top and picks the tube off the bed where Nate dropped it, pressing it back into Nate’s hand. “You’re not sorry. And neither am I.”

Mike sucks in a breath at the first press of Nate’s finger, but he doesn’t look away from Nate. Nate goes as slow as he can bear. He’s up to three, Mike spread open and shaking underneath him, when Mike pulls him down to kiss him, more tongue and teeth than lips. Mike wraps his arms around Nate’s neck and doesn’t let him go. Nate slicks himself one-handed and presses into Mike without looking. He can feel how it hurts. Mike makes a sound against his mouth, raw and beautiful and a warning not to stop all at once.

Mike’s hands move over Nate’s shoulders, restless. Nate reaches up to still them once he’s all the way inside. He leans in and kisses Mike, almost chastely.

When they start to move, it’s all Nate can do to keep from coming. Mike is tight and hot and perfect, moving underneath him with little rolls of his hips. They come apart at the same time. Nate wraps his hand around Mike and it’s over within a few thrusts. Nate comes so hard everything goes white at the edges for a second. Mike follows him, nails digging in to Nate’s shoulders.

 

*

 

Later, they order pizza and shower while they wait for it to come. Mike sets his cell phone on the coffee table and they sit down to eat.

They’ll have to go through Patterson; the others have probably changed cell phones a couple dozen times since Nate and Mike last saw them. Knowing Bryan, though, Rudy’s number is probably already in Mike’s inbox.

“Hey,” Mike says, tugging lightly on Nate’s hair. “Stop thinking.”

Nate rolls his eyes, because when has he ever. Mike uses the distraction to steal Nate’s crust.

“You know they’re all okay,” Mike says. He swallows and picks up the phone, scrolling through the contacts. “Apparently Brad and Ray picked up a couple of strays a while back, which I think means we’re uncles now. And nobody hates you. I promise. Do you want me to hit send?”

Nate takes a deep breath and nods. Mike hits the green button and hands him the phone.

 

*


End file.
